Business entities interact with customers, potential customers and other contacts through a wide variety of different communication channels. Such communication channels include face-to-face, telephone, fax, email, voicemail, wireless communication, Internet sessions, and the like. With all these various communication channels, business entities are faced with managing each customer interaction while meeting service levels and maximizing customer satisfaction. In addition, business entities are faced with staffing and training a workforce to interact with customers through these communication channels through, for example, customer support centers, telebusiness organizations, or sales, marketing and service professionals. Customer relationship management (CRM) applications enable business entities to more effectively sell to, market to, and serve their customers across multiple channels in any industry.
In a competitive marketing environment, business entities have historically strived to increase profits by reducing costs and increasing sales volumes. But there is a limit to the effectiveness of cost cutting initiatives to improve corporate revenues. Once cost cutting initiatives have been in place, a business entity tends to focus on improving pricing performance in order to maximize profitability. One such focus relates to pricing initiatives that can more fully capture value of a business entity's product offerings to their customers. As a result, price management solutions are desired by business entities in helping to achieve profit and revenue objectives. Enabling an organization to enhance margin and revenue by delivering value-driven prices to value-conscious customers throughout the business entity, while employing industry best practices is desirable.
A deal management solution that provides a mechanism for creation of price policies and enforcement of those price policies throughout a business entity is desired. Tying such a deal management solution to a customer relationship management environment will enable dissemination of price policies throughout the business entity through the CRM environment. Thus, price policies can be quickly instituted at every level impacted by the CRM solution. It is further desired to have access to deal and customer data when making price approval decisions. Such access should provide a price approval manager with information showing impact of a deal that does not fit within pricing policies upon other deals in a competitive segment.